Postdoc
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
My research interests are focused on the microbiome and how it influences neonatal and childhood health within the critical first 1000 days of development. For my doctoral research, I investigated how maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, human milk feeding, delivery mode, and other early-life exposures impact the infant gut microbiota in a cohort of infants followed to 2 years of age. We found that the extent of infant human milk feeding was one of the main factors determining gut bacterial composition and abundance, though other exposures like delivery mode and maternal pre-pregnancy BMI had smaller effects that tended to disappear over time. Since I began my doctorate in 2015, the breadth and scope of microbiome studies has greatly expanded, with more attention being given to uncovering the microbiome’s causal role in host health. After completing my doctorate, I sought to continue researching the infant microbiome, with the idea that early microbiome communities and functions may be predictive of health long-term. As such, I joined the Friedman lab with the goal of improving my clinical knowledge of maternal/infant health, expanding my repertoire of bioinformatics techniques, and to gain experience with basic science methodology. The data collected from this proposal will help uncover the direct and indirect relationships between maternal health, infant immune cell maturation, and gut microbiome acquisition, function, and development. Ultimately, I want to continue advancing the infant microbiome field by identifying factors that alter normal microbe-host development as well as the timing of critical microbe-host interactions that are important for healthy infant development.